Gabor Mate - under const Here is what I wrote in April 2014
- Update March 2016 - He also quotes from Louis Menand who said: Its all in your head has the same appeal as Its all in the genes: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are." More below |
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From New Yorker - Lous Menand "Psychology in the nineteen-fifties played the role for many people that genetics does today. Its all in your head has the same appeal as Its all in the genes: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are.Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It cant be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere. So the postwar years were a slack time for political activism and a boom time for psychiatry. The National Institute of Mental Health, founded in 1946, became the fastest-growing of the seven divisions of the National Institutes of Health, awarding psychologists grants to study problems like alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and television violence. Ego psychology, a therapy aimed at helping people adapt and adjust, was the dominant school in American psychoanalysis. By 1955, half of the hospital beds in the United States were occupied by patients diagnosed as mentally ill." "The belief that deviance and dissent could be cured by a little psychiatric social work (This boy dont need a judgehe needs an analysts care!) is consistent with our retrospective sense of the nineteen-fifties as an age of conformity. The darker versionargued, for example, by Eli Zaretsky in his valuable cultural history of psychoanalysis, Secrets of the Soulis that psychiatry became one of the instruments of soft coercion which liberal societies use to keep their citizens in line." tags anti-psychiatry, Gabor Mate |